"I'm just realising as we're going through them - so many of these songs are about loss aren't they? ‘To the East’ isn’t just straight-up melancholy, it’s a song of hope as well; it might be completely redundant, impotent hope, but there is still hope in there. “She's singing to somebody to come back and that the East could be home, but the whole time you're listening to it you suspect the truth of the situation is that those words will never actually be said. Or maybe that's just the way I'm feeling it, I don't know. Again though, it's a very easy song to empathise with; I really believe the voice that's singing it to me. I don't know whether it's about a personal experience or if they're just imagined characters and to be honest, I don't care. I'm right there with them - I'm feeling it too. “I think either our first or second ever show outside of Britain - I can't remember which - was with Electrelane, in Barcelona at that club, Razzmatazz. It was quite the thrill, to be leaving the country to open up for this band we loved. I was really sad when they split up - again, another loss. I wish they were still performing. I think the last time I saw them was at Field Day in 2011 and they were still so great. They did a cover of 'I'm on Fire' by Bruce Springsteen and it was really something else. “They're one of those bands where you only need to hear a few seconds of any given song to know it's them, which means they've also got that trick of being able to make a cover sound like they wrote it themselves.”"

"The longer I live and the more movies I know, the more I love Stanley Donen. However, I fell in love with this film as a child. I went to see it because—well, because I saw everything that came to the Paramount Theater (or the Capitol) in Ashland, Kentucky. But I was especially primed for loving this movie because I was enamored of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly—I had seen that movie ten times the previous year. But Charade was a very different movie from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for a little girl—and for that time—it was very violent, and it scared the hell out of me so much that I thought James Coburn was in my closet at night, and I made my mother go with me to check if he was there before bedtime. Nevertheless, I went back for more every weekend until its run was over. I loved the witty romance between Cary Grant and Audrey, and I loved Paris as much as I had loved New York in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And the mystery works! And I loved that so much I went back again and again, even if it scared the pee outta me. On the DVD, director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone banter amusingly from a long friendship together on the long process it took to make this film. Stone makes the great observation that when you write a mystery, you make it for a second viewing. And if the audience says, “That’s a cheat,” then you didn’t do it right. But if they see it a second time and say, “Oh, it was there all the time, and I didn’t see it,” then you have something. This film has all that and more—i.e., the best clothes ever!"

"Male camaraderie, male love, is a difficult subject to show on film. What does it mean to have one of your best friends pass away? When that unit dies, how do you deal with it? I’m not a married man but I’m sure that when I’m married and have kids I’ll see Husbands in a new light. It’s regular guys trying to make sense of this life, having a good time while they’re doing it; running from their own lives and trying to distract themselves with hookers and gambling and drinking, and they all have families to go back to. They just don’t wanna leave the party. It’s male camaraderie at its most loving and brutal: these guys are terrible to each other, but they’d do anything for each other, and that kind of friendship, those values, mean a lot to me. The way they shot the film, the way they lost funding — there’re these wild stories of how to make a movie that you care about. They lost financing. As the story goes, they put the last bit of money — and they’re half way through the film, they’ve been shooting for six months — they put all the money to throw a party. They got dancers and girls and piano players and I think there was like an elephant, and they invited all these studio heads to come to this party sequence that they were filming — and when they studio saw the scene they said, “This movie’s huge, it’s wild, we’ll cover the rest of the film.” They got the rest of the financing. The scene’s not in the movie — it was never planned to be. So that spirit still excites me. The camaraderie feels familiar."

"I used to go to see movies with my dad. He took me to see ’Round Midnight. Afterward, we bought the soundtrack and listened to it a lot; it was one of the few records I felt okay about putting on when he was in the house. It fascinated me that the music on the record was also the music we saw performed in the movie. This helped me to understand one of the things that I value most in movies: that the action captured by the camera is special and unique and crucial to the value of the movie. Which is to say that the writing is crucial, of course, the preproduction, scoring, and editing are crucial, of course . . . but my main thing is what the camera captured at the moment of its happening. I love to watch a performance that was not created by editing or cinematography or even writing, but rather a performance that is in and of itself, in the moment that it was captured, something of the highest value (because of the collaborative efforts of the major forces involved in making it happen in the first place). And so there are certain directors, “actor’s directors,” who give me more pleasure than most others. No actor is great by himself or herself. Tavernier was able, again and again, to present his players in measured, idiosyncratic, and complete ways. Coup de torchon was the first time I noticed this, and it remains a favorite. Also because Isabelle Huppert is so good and beautiful and Philippe Noiret is a hero’s hero. And because it took this resetting of Jim Thompson’s book (and James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet) for me to understand what Thompson’s work has to offer."

"I forget quite which year this album came out [2004], but it was an astonishing time for new music. There were wonderful albums by Martha Wainwright, Antony And The Johnsons and Arcade Fire. Micah P. Hinson's record was another – it was so simple. It didn't really have choruses or verses – he had a thing which I call a 'ver-chorus', which is something in between the two. It was totally memorable and his words never fail to hit the mark. The simplicity means that the album depends very strongly on the arrangement and they are impeccable. They remind me of Leonard Cohen in some ways. He has a wonderfully deep voice. He seems to have gone through some kind of hell. I am not quite sure what it was – he made reference to it when I saw him play a show. Every single lyric hits home to me. Some of them sound a bit like homilies to me, but the way he sings them makes you believe him. There is not a dud track and I still listen to it, to this day. I have tried many of his later songs, but this is the record if you want an introduction to Micah P. Hinson. It's a great record. When you asked for the list, I could have chosen bands that meant more to me – I didn't choose a record by The Doors – and I could have easily included Martha Wainwright's debut, but in the end I had to be honest with myself and come back to the records I cannot stop playing. This is one of them. It was a toss-up between Martha and Micah, and I went for Micah in the end."

"With the compilation albums, I am cheating. It meant I didn't know which album to choose. I sometimes DJ. When I DJ, I use a system to take people into an ecstatic trance through music. I might start with Brian Eno and some ambient music and then move to other genres. I might use classical music or Indian music. But, invariably, when I get to the third rhythm of trance and when I really want to take people into that state, I am almost forced to go to Underworld again and again. Underworld brought together song and dance in a way that I have not heard anyone match. The Chemical Brothers are great and New Order are obviously great, but Underworld take me to a tribal edge that is so ferocious and yet, simultaneously, so intelligent. 'Rez' is one of my favourite songs – even though that is not one of their most tribal. 'Moaner' and 'Born Slippy' are their more tribal tunes. I find their textures and landscapes and vocals – which don't get in the way and help you lose yourself when you are dancing – make Underworld difficult to surpass. I was so proud of them when they got to do the Olympics in 2012. I felt that was their due. I contacted them before the Olympics and had a lovely communication with them. I told them that I thought they were the most revolutionary and iconoclastic band of the last 20 years. Then, about a year later, Danny Boyle used them during the opening ceremony. I saw them play recently at the Hollywood Bowl and I danced so much that I badly twisted my ankle and couldn't walk for about two weeks. It was still worth it. Dancing injuries are to be worn like medals of honour."

"In the late 70s, I was moving to New York and I was inspired by all this stuff coming out of CBGB’s, and Talking Heads was one of the hugest influences at that time. I started to read about them, and I guess when I heard that record I wasn’t really sure what I thought of it. Some weeks later they came through Binghamton, New York where I was in University. This was the first tour they did after Jerry Harrison joined the band, it must have been late ‘77 or early ‘78 they were still touring in a station wagon, I remember seeing them drive up and they were playing this same little pub out the edge of the campus that my band were playing. As soon as I saw them it was like everything clicked. This was one of the most impressive concerts I’d ever seen and all of a sudden their music became super important to me. I’ve been listening to a lot of their records recently. I was going to choose Fear Of Music because that’s the record I’ve been listening to again right now and I’ve always thought that was their obscure third record but I didn’t realise it had ‘Life During Wartime’ on it and stuff like that and ‘Cities’, but they were such an incredible, experimental band. That period of music –Talking Heads and Elvis Costello and Television and Devo’s first record, those records all seemed to define a new period of music for me and it wasn’t exactly punk, it wasn’t ‘God Save The Queen’ or ‘Tommy Gun’ or whatever The Clash were coming out with (which was also really strong), it just struck me as art music for the era."

"This album is a real folly. I don't want to defend Phil Collins for a second, and when I see footage of the Slipperman [a naked lumpy monster with inflatable genitalia who emerged onto the stage by crawling out of a giant penis - Ed] I just chuckle at the thought that it just didn't make any sense to Phil Collins and it really pissed him off. He didn't like seeing Peter Gabriel in this costume. Gabriel didn't give a fuck though, he just wanted to do this piece of theatre. Just round the corner from here is the Palace Theatre, and that's where I saw them do The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, two nights running, when I was 15. We just used to sneak into all the gigs, me and my mates. We were desperate to get into this one because we'd seen them on the Whistle Test but we couldn't get in for love nor money. We were stood outside and the guy who ran Virgin Records on Lever Street was there. I used to go to that shop three or four times a week to buy all my albums, and at about five to eight he came to the door and he recognised me from the shop because I used to ask him for advice, and he beckoned me over and put a ticket in my hand. It was sixth row from the front, and I was just blown away by it. It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen. It was presented as theatre. There were a lot of props. There was a big mesh cage that Gabriel performed in, there were a load of strobes going off. How did they represent a wall of nothingness sweeping across Times Square? Just a bit of smoke I think."